


The fall and rise of powerful men

by wishwellingtons



Category: Sherlock (TV), Thick of It (UK)
Genre: Baroness Sureka, Crossover, Fix-It, M/M, Mycroft's Meddling, Post Reichenbach, Post-Goolding, Scientology jokes, Swearing, where did Jamie go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:53:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wishwellingtons/pseuds/wishwellingtons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A man fell off a hospital roof, and Jamie Macdonald's been gone three years. Now he's back: short on explanations, but very long indeed on why Malcolm can't manage without him - or his new friends.</p><p>Written after 4x06 of TTOI and before series 3 of Sherlock (BBC).</p>
            </blockquote>





	The fall and rise of powerful men

**Author's Note:**

> The Sherlock characters in this fic are glimpsed, rather than seen in detail - but they are discussed, so I hope you enjoy their inclusion. Thanks!

Malcolm had readied his opening gambits  for when he saw Jamie again.  
  
He'd given the little shit a monstering, of course, but neither Malcolm, nor anyone else inflicted with the pleasure of Jamie's company, had expected Motherwell's proudest ambassador to just _disappear_.

It had been three years, of course, in which Malcolm hadn't picked up the phone or given a _shit_ when major and obvious - or indeed private, disgusting - anniversaries of theirs passed without a greetings card or a celebratory kissogram or fecal matter.

Malcolm knew Jamie wasn't dead, because there'd been no spectral visitation, request for funeral funds, halfwitted relatives or warrants for his arrest.

He knew Jamie couldn't even be short of _money_ , because for three years nobody had tried, ineptly, to hack Malcolm's credit cards. And Malcolm trusted that the above meant that Jamie - wherever he was - wasn't _really_ in trouble. It was important to Malcolm that this was the case; that the half-pint, half-cracked alleycat's uncompromised sense of survival had kept him going, wherever on earth he'd washed up. And besides, if Jamie ever really _did_ wash up, whether in hospital or prison or on the bonny banks of Loch Needle, it'd be Malcolm who heard about it first. Jamie would _want_ that, surely, and he didn't have any other powerful friends. Not _friends_.  
  
Malcolm would of course see Jamie again. He'd planned it; planned to be gracious, magnanimous, terrifying and hilarious in one.

He hadn't planned to be ancient, fucked, colourless and destroyed, and facing (via his second whiskey of the morning) a criminal prosecution as the best of now-possible outcomes.  
  
Nor did Malcolm expect to be sitting on the floor of his home study, morosely sorting through leaks past (as if THAT was any good, anymore) and boxing up a lifetime, when Jamie scrambled in through the _open_ window, bringing the trellis and most of a clematis with him, and then stumbled onto his feet with a look that said he'd just done something clever. "You've changed the fucking _locks_ ," he panted, sounding moderately outraged.  
  
Malcolm gaped up at him.  
  
"Where the fuck have you been?"  
  
Jamie looked furtive, industrial strength, while removing trellis from his hair. "Eh," he said. It's not much, after a three year gap.  
  
Malcolm glared, as the best available alternative to cardiac arrest. Jamie had smears of mud on his cheeks, and a new suit which didn't look like he should be in court. None of this was acceptable.  
  
"A man fell off a roof," Jamie said vaguely. "I've been wi' _him_."  
  
"Oh, fuckin' have you?" Malcolm demanded, mustering  a snarl and a splutter between sub-gravestone rows of teeth. It was extremely annoying to see Jamie spend the rant disentangling himself from shrubbery and woodwork. He tried his permafrost-cum-regulation sneer. "And why'd you stop? Come back like the fuckin' spider in the bath you are."  
  
There was the tremendously loud sound of a very thin body colliding with a half-emptied filing cabinet. Malcolm was pleased and a little winded to remember that nobody'd slammed him into anything for slightly over three years.  
  
"Because I've finished savin' the fuckin' _world_ , and I've come back tae deal wi' what's left o'your sorry arse." Blue eyes allowed Malcolm to consider the very real possibility that Jamie, in his absence, had acquired some sort of deadly Messiah complex. Jamie allowed himself a little shake. "Christ Almighty. What was that _shite_ in front of the committee? Holdin' the mirror up to _gash_ at Baroness fuckin' Suriname - "  
  
" - _Sureka_ , you missionary gobshite."  
  
"Aye, Sureka." Face twisted, Jamie mimicked Malcolm's swansong. "I-am-you-and-you-are-me - hardly fuckin' complimentary to the puir lassie. She's - hot. Great tits. You're colder than a drowned tramp after three days in Molly's - in a mortuary." Malcolm's eyes narrowed. Jamie looked innocent and unfazed (ergo demented) and shoved again at the intercostal structures of Malcolm's chest. "Even for the  _auld_ days, you're unappetisingly thin. I thought you'd be a fat fucker, now Jul'us Nicholson's cramming Duchy jizzcake up your prolapse - "

" - Jul'us?"  
  
"Aye. Don't pretend Julius _didnae_ start fuckin' you the second I was off the scene. Actually, where is the big baldy cockjelly, surely he's had you _tagged_?"  
  
Malcolm peered at Jamie, but stopped struggling against the hand (consciously stopped. In fact, he'd been incriminatingly pliant for the past two minutes). Jamie's face was always set to stereo; he was breathing audibly. Malcolm was pewter and egg-blue and nine kinds of gristle-through-steel.  
  
"Julius doesnae fuck me, or _feed_ me, you pathetic slum brat," Malcolm said softly. He frowned. "Jul'us has been in Oxford for the past two years, did you not - they made him - Provost or _Queen_ or whatever it is they call them. He married a banker and lives in a fuckin' _tower._ ...Jamie, where the fuck _have_ you been?"  
  
Jamie shifted. Looked beetle-browed and fighty while he contemplated an answer. "I told you. Man fell off a roof. Jumped, really. Well, no' actually that man, but - I've been workin' for him. Kind of like you. Only without your obvious need for my _cock_ ," he smirked, and Malcolm rolled his eyes.  
  
"Get tae fuck, Jamie. Whatever you're planning, it's too l - _ow,_ christ, stop pushing or you'll lose your wanking hand."  
  
"DULL, ye're fuckin' _dull_." Malcolm blinked. Something uncanny had flickered over Jamie's face for a second, making his blue eyes bluer and the rest of him strangely unfamilar. " - dull like you've lost your fuckin' brain. I'm plannin' your comeback, of which you're sadly in need now ye've wanked out your resignation gash-up all over Goolding. I watched it on the plane. Like an infomercial for fuckin' erectile dysfunction."  
  
" - what the - Jamie, you dinnae even have a fuckin' passport! They _took_ your passport after - "  
  
" - we NEVER TALK ABOUT BENIDORM - "  
  
" - only too fuckin' willingly, now get off, I've got fuckups A-L between my shoulderblades and they sting."  
  
"Like bein' done up the shitter by _Ollie Reeder_."  
  
"I have not been _done_ up the - no, seriously, why the passport? Are you a drugs mule now, is that it? If you get angry enough, do you shit heroin?"  
  
"The man on the roof, eh? Well, the man people're stupit enough tae think - anyway, this chap, he's got a _brother._ Ginger, fat fucker. Like Jul'us wi' an umbrella not a speech impediment. POWERFUL." A nasty feeling crept through what was left of Malcolm's stomach, watching the shimmering devotion on Jamie's rapt features. It was of a kind he hadn't seen since the _early_ days, when rescuing Jamie from his time as a god-botherer (a god- _harasser_ would be nearer the term, to say nothing of Jamie's activities with regards to His children). A weaker man than Malcolm might have mistaken the sting for jealousy.  
  
"So you're his bagman now?"  
  
"You sure you havenae got Jul'us stuffed up somewhere, disguised as a human fuckin' sofa? I'm no man's _bagman_ , y'middle-class cunt." Malcolm registered surprise that Jamie'd even understood the word. For the first time in months, curiosity had started to outweigh self-pity.  
  
"What are you, then? The saviour of my reputation? Hermione fuckin' Granger, come wi' her wee _time-turne_ r to turn the clock back on the _shite_ that was this enquiry? Or are you going to beat up every Lord Justice in the land, to keep me out of prison? It'll take more than bitin' their fuckin kneecaps, Jamie, let me tell you." Jamie made a vivid and eloquent gesture with the hand not fisting Malcolm's shirt.  
  
"No. Fuck that. God, you've gone senile these three years," Jamie said disgustedly (but, nevertheless, kept on raking Malcolm's chest with his eyes). "Sod Parliament. S'no where the _real_ action is. Nothing _we_ do - or you, you moulderin' cadaver - makes a shit's worth ae difference. Get tae fuck. We're going where the _power_ is." His eyes gleamed. "Car's waiting, Malc."  
  
"What is this, Scientology? Are you taking me off to a compound to drink loganberry cyanide and watch videos about thetans?"

Jamie screwed up his face in impatience. "No, _fuck_ off and _listen_. I'm taking you tae meet the most powerful man in Britain. The wee roof-man's brother. C'mon, Malc, there'll be Fanta."  
  
"Is this the drugs? Is all that home-brew LSD coming back to haunt whatever - blackened wreck of a frontal lobe you've got there? Who's the _man on the roof_? Should I be calling _MIND_?" Jamie stamped his foot, which was markedly more subdued behaviour than before. The walls were allowed to keep paper, for example. "Why the fuck d'you expect me to get in _any_ car with you?"  
  
"Because I missed you," said Jamie, honestly.

 

Malcolm felt like a vampire suddenly given sunlight. Or a cat who'd just spotted a phantom horse. "And because you fuckin' missed me, you... anorexic weary git. It all went Nicola- _tits_ -Murray- _up_ when I fucked off, admit it. C'mon, Malc. It'll be an adventure." And Jamie smiled.  
  
When the undersized madman proposing to abduct him in pursuit of unimaginable power and (crucially) no prison sentences nodded towards the window, Malcolm gave said madman a wary look and went to see.

On the drive was a sleek, unplaceable black car of the kind that might melt into buildings or - if visible - convey totally mute respectability while being the largest and most powerful car on the street. Unusually for such a car (which, as if by law, always keep four tinted windows shut, and thus seem empty), the passenger window was retracted a few inches.

Inside, a sleek, well-coiffed brunette was tapping away on a phone. Malcolm's eyes narrowed and he glared at her from between invisible lashes. He didn't want to know what Jamie might have been getting up to with her - she looked like a filthy version of Sam. While Malcolm was looking, a small, nondescript man with military bearing and a really awful jumper walked purposefully down the street. He was carrying two paper cups of tea and knocked on the back window with his elbow. The back window descended fractionally, then sufficiently; Malcolm saw an elegant white hand appear and accept the cup. The small man sighed; not loud enough to be audible, but with a weary patience visible throughout his body. After some silent communion with the sky, he took a sip of his tea, burned his lip, swore (audibly this time), and went to get in behind the driver.

In the moments before the window went back up, Malcolm saw that the tea-receiver was clad in a blue wool coat that was _not uninteresting_. If, like Malcolm, you could have bankrupted yourself thrice over in overcoats from Jermyn Street or Armani.  
  
Jamie hooked a warm, uninvited, unrepentant chin over Malcolm's shoulder. "See, Malc? They're waiting, it'll be brilliant."  
  
"To go where?" Malcolm sounded hoarse, even by his own approximation. But the past few weeks had run him ragged, and Jamie's irrepressibly familiar mouth was right by his ear. He let his eyes fall shut. God, he was tired. Jamie's devious arms began to snake round his waist.  
  
"Mycroft Holmes."  
  
"What's that, a think tank?"  
  
Jamie grinned and bit his neck. "Wait and see."


End file.
